Seagate is looking to create its own law about the increase of density in its products, aiming to double capacity every 30 months on its hard drive families. They may not be as fast and sexy as an NVMe drive, but for long term storage which you don't expect to be constantly accessed, the price is very attractive. They will no longer be using perpendicular magnetic recording, with all lines moving to HAMR, which should allow them to create a 20TB or greater drive by 2020 and perhaps reach 100TB by 2026. Other companies are investigating different recording technologies, which The Register briefly mentions here.

"Seagate has set a course to deliver a 48TB disk drive in 2023 using its HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology, doubling areal density every 30 months, meaning 100TB could be possible by 2025/26."

Inside the Barracuda Pro are eight platters each 1.75 TB in size and comes with a nice addition to the warranty, if the drive dies before two years have expired you can ship the drive to Seagate and they will attempt to recover your data for free. The Guru of 3D's testing showed the accuracy of the 250MB/sec rating, as expected from a modern SATA HDD. The total warranty is five years and the drive is rated for 24/7 use with a 300TB/yr rating so there are certainly plenty of usages for the drive.

"It's here! We review the Megalodon among the HDDs, the Barracuda Pro 14TB from Seagate is unleashed today, that's a 14.000GB HDD folks! This, by far, is the biggest single consumer unit storage device to date. It might not offer SSD performance, but it certainly isn't slow. It's the year 2018, it's big but with these massive HDD platters, will it be fast enough?"

No matter what you need it for, Seagate can provide supersized storage for your needs. To lead with the most important information, the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro 14TB will run you $529.99 and $599.99 respectively, a 14TB BarraCuda Pro sits at $579.99, a SkyHawk14TB a mere $509.99 and the Exos X14 at $614.99. These prices might sound expensive until you think how much 14TB of NVMe storage will cost you.

The IronWolf and IronWolf Pro as designed to be used in a NAS, with firmware designed to provide reliability in a variety of arrays along with health management and recovery tools baked right in. The drives are rated at 300TB/year, with a 5 year warranty on the Pro and 3 years on the other.

The Barracuda Pro is one you are more likely to grab, the 7200 RPM HDD has 256MB Of cache which allows up to 250mb/s data transfer rates depending on the task you require of it. You will get a 5 year warranty to ensure you get your moneys worth out of the drive.

The Skyhawk is great for surveillance systems, the 14TB allows you to capture over 9000 hours of H.264 video with 1M pixels, medium quality, at 15FPS; with support for up to 64 attached cameras. It would also make a great drive for a DVR if you intended to record every single moment of TV you missed while on vacation. The 3 year warranty in part reflects the expectation you will be writing to this drive 24/7/

Last is the Exos X14, which you can order already installed into the chassis you see above, with up to a 1.4PB of storage. The helium-based design is not only for longevity, Seagate claims a 10% reduction in weight versus other drives.

During the Open Compute Summit Seagate showed off a new drive in its Helium-filled Exos X lineup that offers up 14TB of storage in a 3.5-inch SATA hard drive package. The aptly named Exos X14 is a low power 7200 RPM drive that utilizes PMR rather than the more exotic methods (shingled, HAMR, ect) and is a drop-in replacement that Seagate claims allows up to 40% more storage space per rack than previous drives – up to 3,360 TB per rack!

The drive is aimed at datacenter customers and cloud storage providers clamoring for fast-enough affordable storage. The Exos X14 platform is expected to use a whopping 9-platters each holding 1.55 terabytes. Beyond that, Seagate is not sharing exact specifications except to say that it has bested the sustained transfer rates of the Exos X12 and competitors and has leading and reliable random I/O performance that has been optimized for hyperscale environments (so take that for what you will) likely thanks to the increased storage density.

Seagate did note that the new drives support Seagate Secure encryption and the drive is rated for FIPS 140-2 / Level 2 and ISO/IEC 15408 certifications so at least in theory it meets a minimum level of IT security practices in the methods it uses to protect the data stored on it.

A research study performed by IDC and sponsored by Seagate found that worldwide data creation could hit up to 163 Zettabytes (163 trillion Gigabytes!) by 2025 (10-times the amount of data created last year) which is mind-boggling. Even if the reality is half of that, that’s still an absolutely staggering amount of data that needs to be stored somewhere and both spinning rust and expensive flash are going to have to make some significant advancements to get to that point – and to that point with an acceptable TCO.

The Exos X14 is expected to start shipping to datacenter customers this summer and is currently being sampled to select partners like Baidu and Facebook (Facebook was showing off a server packed with the drives at OCP 2018).

Also interesting is Seagate’s announcement of “Mach.2” multi-actuator technology and its advancements into making HAMR (heat assisted magnetic recording) more reliable both of which are going to be important for the future.

Seagate Technology has announced its quarterly earnings for the second quarter of fiscal year 2018 (the quarter ending 12/29/2017). The Cupertino-based company has reported quarterly revenue of $2.9 billion, net income of $159 million, and diluted EPS of 55 cents. On a Non-GAAP reporting basis, Seagate saw Q2 FY2018 net income of $431 million and earnings per share of $1.48.

Seagate's revenue remained flat year-over-year, but increased 11.5% versus the previous quarter. Net income decreased 12% QOQ and 46% YoY using GAAP accounting methods, but on a non-GAAP basis Seagate reports a 54% increase versus the previous quarter and 4.6% increase versus the same quarter last year so it's not all bad news. The company is also managed to amass quite a bit of cash including $850 million from operations and $773 of free cash flow.

Q2 FY2018

Q1 FY2018

Q2 FY2017

QOQ

YoY

Revenue

$2.9 billion

$2.6 billion

$2.9 billion

+11.5%

=

Net Income (GAAP)

$159 million

$181 million

$297 million

-12%

-46%

Diluted Earnings Per Share (GAAP)

0.55

0.62

1.00

-11.5%

-45%

Net Income (Non-GAAP)

$431 million

$279 million

$412 million

+54%

+4.6%

Diluted EPS (Non-GAAP)

1.48

0.96

1.38

+54%

+7.2%

Seagate manufactures both mechanical hard drives and solid state drives, and while the company cranks out many internal and external drives for consumers, the company is very much focused on the enterprise market, especially where its solid state storage is concerned. Seagate states in its press release that it is heavily focused on cloud storage with its 60TB 3.5" SAS drive and NVMe add-in-card (which it demonstrated at FMS 2016). The company has partnered with Facebook to build its 1U Lightning storage solution (up to 120TB of flash storage using 60 2TB M.2 NVMe drives) and continues to target the enterprise and exascale/HPC markets with their absolutely massive and ever-growing data demands for big data analytics of financial and user data, uploaded and user-generated media, cloud backup, and research/simulation data for supercomputers. Further, the company continues to push mechanical enterprise storage to ever higher capacities with Barracuda Pro and also has its Ironwolf NAS and sequential-optimized Skyhawk drives for surveillance systems. On the flash storage front, Seagate has its Nytro M.2 NVMe and Nytro SAS SSDs.

Facebook's 1U Lightning JBOF System using 60 Seagate XM1440 M.2 SSDs.

I am interested to see where Seagate (STX) will go with its flash storage (Will they ever bring it to the consumer market in a big way? They do have a few products, but their focus seems to be mostly on enterprise.) and if they will manage to match or surpass Western Digital and Toshiba this year in the enterprise HDD capacity war. Currently, the company's Barracuda, IronWolf, and Exos drives top out at 12TB including the second generation Helium-sealed versions.

The Seagate Barracuda Pro 10TB Enterprise HDD won't give you the fastest access to your data, but if you have a large amount of storage in a reliable format it is worth looking at this review. The MSRP of $444.45USD is much lower than you would pay for 10TB of SSD storage, though you might be able to set up several smaller disks in a Drobo or similar device for a similar price. The MTBF is 2.5 million hours, the endurance rating is 550TB per year and there is a 5 year warranty so even with heavy usage you should be able to depend on this drive for quite a long time. You can drop by NikKTech to see how it performs.

"The Seagate Barracuda Pro 10TB hard disk drive offers good endurance levels with great performance and an even greater capacity. The Enterprise Capacity 3.5 V6 10TB model again by Seagate boosts even higher performance and endurance numbers without asking more from your wallet."

If you have a huge collection of files you want backed up, Seagate's new external HDD is a decent alternative to deleting what you don't need anymore so it will fit on most drives. Inside the Backup Plus is a shingled Barracuda with 5 platters of 1TB giving you a huge amount of storage for around $160. It also comes with a two year OneDrive subscription which gives you another 200GB of online storage. The copying process should not take a painful amount of time, the testing results at Nikktech show it to be one of the faster external drives they have benchmarked.

"The brand new Backup Plus 5TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive by Seagate doesn't only offer plenty of storage capacity and impressive performance for when on the go but it also comes bundled with a 2-year OneDrive 200GB subscription. Oh and did we mention that it's priced just right?"

Seagate and Amazon have partnered up to offer a new USB external hard drive called the Seagate Duet that, while functioning as you would expect an external drive to, also automatically keeps files synced between itself and the user's Amazon Drive cloud storage. The Duet is based on Seagate's Backup Plus drive series and is a 1TB drive with two platters and PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology that spins at 5400 RPM. It connects to PCs over USB 3.0.

During the initial setup, users provide their Amazon Drive login to the Duet software which will upload all media files stored on the external drive to Amazon Drive as well as download any files stored on Amazon Drive regardless of whether they were uploaded by the Duet or other devices not using the Duet software.

Seagate offers a two year warranty on the drive which will be an Amazon.com exclusive and available on December 10th for $99.99. The Duet does come at quite the premium over other drives (even Seagate's own) with non-automatic cloud syncing 1TB USB 3.0 drives coming in at around $50 and 2TB drives able to be found easily for less than the Duet's $100 price.

However, there is a bit of a saving grace in that the Seagate Duet does come with one year of free Amazon Drive Unlimited storage which normally costs $59.99 a year.

For enthusiasts, there are cheaper 1TB or higher capacity drives for the same price as the Duet, but I find myself thinking that this would be a great gift for family members to help them protect their precious family photos and videos from a drive failure or lost drive! With the holidays coming up fast, if you have not figured out the perfect gift yet this may just be the thing to buy – and if something does happen, the real gift is that their photos are safely backed up!

Seagate designed the 10TB SkyHawk HDD for recording video surveillance by adding in firmware they refer to as ImagePerfect. This is designed for handling 24/7 surveillance and extends the endurance life of the drive to 180TB a year, for the length of the three year warranty. Constantly recording video means this drive will write far more often than most other usages scenarios and reads will be far less important. eTeknix tried the drive out in their usual suite of benchmarks; being somewhat difficult to set up a test to verify the claimed support for up to 64HD recordings simultaneously. If you are looking for durable storage at a reasonable price and might even consider needing more than eight drives of storage you should check the SkyHawk out.

"I’ve recently had a look at the 10TB IronWolf NAS HDD from Seagate and today it is time to take a closer look at its brother, the brand new SkyHawk DVR and NVR hard disk drive with a massive 10TB capacity. Sure, you could use NAS optimized drives for simple video setups, but having a video and camera optimized surveillance disk does bring advantages. Especially when your recorded video is critical."